The Continuation
by RockSunner
Summary: This is my version of what happens after 'The End'. Spoilers for TBL and TE.
1. Stalked

**The Continuation**

This is my version of what might have happened after the series. There are spoilers here for _The Beatrice Letters_ and _The End_. All characters belong to Daniel Handler.

**Chapter 1**

Ten years. For ten years my research on the Baudelaires had hit a brick wall. (Not a literal one, like the one an enemy once tried to entomb me with in an underground cellar. I shouldn't have believed him about the Amontillado. No, this was a figurative wall, equally frustrating to a writer, though not as deadly.)

The Hotel Denouement fire had left the V.F.D. in confusion, not only because of the deaths and scattering into hiding of so many members, but also the loss of all the evidence we had brought to the trial. My regular sources of information were exhausted. Dewey Denouement was dead, my sister Kit was missing, and so were Captain Widdershins, the Quagmires, and many others I had desperately hoped to see again.

My publishers were holding up all the manuscripts I had sent to them. They refused to publish the books without a conclusion. My last book consisted entirely of the words "I have been completely unable to find out what happened to the Baudelaires after they left the Hotel Denouement with Count Olaf in his boat. The End."

I am writing for my own records an account of how I came to be able to finish the books and what followed. Since I don't intend to publish this, I will not include the usual warning to the reader to avoid reading this at all costs lest you are driven mad with grief. Just in case, if you do somehow find this manuscript, avoid reading it at all costs lest you are driven mad with grief.

I speculated that the Baudelaires had been shipwrecked, so I tried several times to shipwreck myself in hopes of arriving at the same place they did. I pushed off onto a stormy stream in a rented canoe with holes in it. I set out to sea in a large wooden boat in the path of a storm, with a notebook and pen poised to take notes. Neither shipwreck worked, and the experiences were so harrowing that I did not dare to keep trying.

At long last, I received a completely unexpected message. It purported (a word which here means "claimed") to have been delivered by long-distance swimmers and swans, but the good condition of the paper made that unlikely. It also purported to come from Beatrice Baudelaire, the woman I loved and who I believed was long dead. Could it really be from her? Had she perhaps survived and gone into hiding? She used the phrase "My Silence Knot," her old pet name for me.

More likely, this was from some villainess out to trick me. With trembling hands, I did as the letter suggested and wrote in the margin the initial of the person I suspected had sent it: "E?". 


	2. Security

**Chapter 2**

I didn't know what to make of that first letter. If the writer was pretending to be Beatrice Baudelaire, she had made several mistakes. She said she had an early bedtime, which was very unlike the Beatrice I knew. She also wrote that she had never seen me before. Was she being metaphorical?

Just in case, I retreated from my office on the thirteenth floor of one of the nine dreariest buildings in the city and went to my backup hiding place, a bat cave on a brae. This was an old V.F.D. secret place which was decorated with hideous yellow wallpaper as a security measure (the wallpaper had once driven a woman insane; the trick was not to stare at it too long). I left a tangled set of clues to my location in my office. Only the real Beatrice or a very good detective could figure them out.

I waited several months, but nobody came to the cave except for sheep; I resisted their peer-pressure to grow a woolly coat. Finally I gave up and returned to the city where I could get a good root-beer float.

Back in my office I found another letter from my mystery correspondent. She had traced me to the brae, but not before I left there. She had raided my office and taken a box with many important letters. Returning to the city, she continued to stalk me for weeks, even renting the office directly above mine. For a long time I was afraid to respond to her. One fear was that she was an enemy; the other was that she was a friend but not the beloved woman I hoped she was.

Finally, one evening in my favorite root-beer float emporium, I received a small card. It mimicked my note to Beatrice inviting her on our first date. It said I could tear the card in half and she would never try to contact me again. But if I wanted to meet her, she was the ten-year-old girl at the corner table.

I didn't tear the card in half. I stood up and walked over to her table. As soon as I got close, I could see the image of her mother in her. My last hope that it might be my former fiancee in disguise evaporated.

"We meet at last, Mr. Snicket," said the young woman with a half-smile and a piercing gaze. "Are you who I think you are?"

"Of course I am who you think I am," I said. "I'm your uncle."


	3. Soda

**Chapter 3**

I was about to give Beatrice an awkward hug when she held up a hand.

"No, I'm here to ask you a favor. I don't think it's right for me to presume on our blood relationship, because I never knew my mother, Kit Snicket. The only people I really think of as parents are my foster family, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire." Her voice was strained but full of intelligence. She was clearly a highly-precocious ten-year-old.

"The favor, I presume, is to help you find them again?" I asked.

"Yes, and to help me rescue them if they need rescuing," said Beatrice. There was real desperation in her voice.

"Of course I will," I said. "They're important to me too." I didn't mention the reason they were so important to me was because of the love I bore their mother, her namesake.

"In return, I'll give you information that will let you finish your books," said Beatrice. "I can also help you correct some mistakes. I found some your first edition, and there are serious errors."

"You mean my vanity press edition," I said. "I know; it was hacked out in the early days of my investigations and released to a few V.F.D. libraries only. I vowed to publish the whole story to the world some day. Now I can, if you can tell me what happened to the Baudelaires after they left the Hotel Denouement in the boat."

"I can tell you the basics. They ended up shipwrecked on an island, raising me," said Beatrice. "But for the whole story I'll have to take you there. I was too young to remember everything."

"Shipwrecked!" I exclaimed. "I thought so, but I haven't been able to find the place. What island was it?"

"I don't know the name. It used to have an advanced V.F.D. colony but it had turned into a primitive cult when the Baudelaires got there."

"I've heard stories of an island like that," I said. "But the water around it is so shallow that the only way there is by shipwreck. I tried to shipwreck myself, but it didn't work."

"You can get there if you know the right day of the year, when the tides turn and the waters get deeper," said Beatrice. "I know that day. It happens to be my birthday, and it's next week."

"What happened to the Baudelaires?" I asked. "Did you leave them on the island?"

Beatrice sighed. "No, when I was a year old they tried to get back to civilization. There was another huge storm at sea. Our boat sank, but Violet saved me by making a small boat of their books and papers."

"A Vaporetto of Favorite Detritus," I said. "Kit knew how to make those."

"It was only big enough for me," said Beatrice. "The waves carried me off and that was the last I saw of them. But they're survivors. I know they are still alive. They have to be."

"How did you survive yourself?" I asked.

"I drifted to another island which had a few V.F.D. members," said Beatrice. "It was difficult period in my life; I'd rather not talk about it now. But I did learn to be a baticeer."

She reached under the root-beer-float emporium table and lifted up a small cage. In it was a small animal hanging upside-down.

"This is Lugosi," she said. "He's a fruit bat." She dipped her straw in her root beer float and offered it to Lugosi at an angle. The bat pulled the straw down like a lever and began sucking the sugary fluid off of it.

"Hello, Lugosi," I said. "He's very cute."

"Thank you," said Beatrice. "I think he's wonderful. I have one more question you may be able to answer. The Baudelaires couldn't tell me for sure who my father was. My mother was your sister. Do you know?"

"I didn't, but now I do," I said. "I see it in your ears and forehead. Your father was Count Olaf."


	4. Secrets

**Chapter 4**

"The Baudelaires took me to visit the graves of both Kit and Olaf on the island," said Beatrice. "I had the feeling that I was visiting my parent's graves."

"So both Kit and Olaf are dead," I sighed. "I thought they must be, because there's been no sign of them for years."

"Both died the day I was born," said Beatrice. "Olaf from a harpoon wound and my mother from mushroom poisoning, or so I was told. As I said, I would have been an orphan without the Baudelaires."

"And Dewey Denouement was already dead, so you would have been an orphan either way," I said.

"So there was another possible father in the picture, a Dewey Denouement? The Baudelaires never told me anything about him."

I wondered if that was because they chose to spare Beatrice the story of how they accidently harpooned Dewey. I decided to say nothing about it for the moment.

"Dewey certainly loved Kit, but she didn't feel as strongly about him," I replied. "Kit fell for Olaf during our V.F.D. training days. You saw from my early letters that he and I were in the same coding class. He was trained for our side of the schism and only switched sides later."

"What did Kit think about that?" Beatrice asked.

"She wasn't happy, but the heart is strange sometimes. It continues to love even when love should be impossible. Believe me, I know."

"Was Count Olaf really as idiotic as the Baudelaires described him?" Beatrice asked. "I'd hate to think that I inherited those genes."

"Not at all," I said. "He often chose to act the fool to put his enemies off guard. For example, he adopted an absurd laugh, then dropped it when it no longer suited him. He later pretended to be unable to spell, which would fool nobody who knew his anagramming skills."

"When could he and my mother have gotten together?" I asked.

"Right after the Baudelaires left Prufrock Preparatory School, Kit went there as a teacher, on an undercover mission to recruit promising young students as V.F.D. members. Olaf had just kidnapped two of the Quagmire triplets and my research shows he sneaked back there to look for clues to the whereabouts of the Quagmire sapphires. Kit sent me a cryptic note that her mission had borne unexpected fruit. At the time I thought she meant the two orphans she recruited, but that would have been expected fruit, wouldn't it?"

"I suppose so," said Beatrice with a little blush.

"After that mission, she began dating a reclusive sub-sub-librarian who had always been infatuated with her. Dewey was nice, but not really her type. He lived a sheltered life and was quite naive, whereas she was action-oriented and a bit pessimistic. She once described him to me as the 'dewey-eyed idealist.' I really think she only took up with him to give you a more respectable father."

"Well, I think I had the best possible parents in the Baudelaires," Beatrice said.

"I think so too," I agreed.

Beatrice and I got organized and quickly put together a mission to the island. We launched the day before the tide was due to turn, with the idea of getting as close as we could to the island the night before, so we would have maximum time for exploration and still get out the same day. I bought plenty of cameras and film, as well as my usual commonplace books.

Miraculously, the weather was good for the entire voyage and we reached the vicinity of the continental shelf. We continued our conversations while we waited for the water to deepen.

"One thing in your letters puzzled me," I said. "You wrote that Sunny appeared on the radio to discuss her recipes. I've been hunting for them for years, and I surely would have picked up their trail if that had happened."

"Sunny had created some great recipes and longed to share them with the world," Beatrice said. "Violet built a small radio station on the island. I don't know if it really had the range to reach the outside world, but we did it to make Sunny happy. Violet worked the radio controls, Klaus was the interviewer, and I was the studio audience. She was so happy talking about how to make coconut-apple cookies. It's one of my sweetest memories of her."

"I doubt it reached anyone since this island is so remote," I said.

"Probably not," Beatrice said. "I remember hoping it would reach Ishmael and his followers and they would regret abandoning the Baudelaires the way they did."

"Ishmael?" I said. "Was that the name of the island leader?"

"Yes, and I think he must have been a terrible person, though I never met him," said Beatrice.

"If it's the same man, he's an old enemy of mine," I said. "I'll tell you what I know about him." 


	5. Schoolteacher

**Chapter 5**

"You knew Ishmael?" Beatrice asked.

"I researched him," I said. "He interfered with one of my missions and caused the loss of an important bathyscaphe."

"Was he on the other side of the schism?" asked Beatrice.

"Worse. He was an impostor, not a V.F.D. agent at all," I said.

"So that's why he kept his tattoo covered under clay," Beatrice mused.

"It would make sense to keep it hidden since it was a forgery he made for himself," I said. "He was once just a chemistry teacher, and not a good one. He taught only what was needed to pass the standard tests. He wouldn't let students do their own experiments. 'I'm not going to force you,' he would say, "But you'll get along much better in life if you accept the word of authority about these things and don't rock the boat.'"

"That wouldn't suit me at all," said Beatrice.

"There was a student named Rose that he felt sorry for. She had lost an ear and an eyebrow in an explosion in her grandfather's laboratory. I thought it was just an accident at first, but now I suspect foul play.

"Rose and her two siblings were orphaned by that explosion, and they had to move to the home of a terrible guardian. She a violent alcoholic, known as Cantaloupe Olga because she had killed a man with her bare hands and an overripe cantaloupe.

"Rose came to him with a problem, 'Teacher, I think my guardian is trying to poison me. I've been pouring out the tea she gives me, and it caused a plant to die.'

"Does she drink the tea herself?" Ishmael asked her.

"Yes, but she always puts sugar in it," Rose said.

"Bring me a sample of the tea and the sugar and I'll analyze it for you," said Ishmael.

"Sure enough, he found that the tea was poisoned and that the sugar contained a bitter antidote. 'Make sure you take your tea with the sugar too, and there will be no more problems,' Ishmael said.

"Won't you help me report her to the police? She might try something else," Rose said.

"That would be rocking the boat," Ishmael said.

"Rose and her siblings decided to run away instead. Cantaloupe Olga was furious and threatened Ishmael. In fear of his life, Ishmael quit his job. From then on, he put the bitter antidote in his tea as a precaution against being poisoned.

"He went to a small seaside town and had lunch at the Anxious Clown restaurant.

"I'd like tea with wormwood," he told the waiter, Larry.

"You mean, tea should be as bitter as wormwood?" Larry said. "I didn't realize this was a sad occasion."

"Well, it is," Ishmael said. "I've lost my job and I'm looking for a quiet place to hide out. Here, maybe."

"You mean, the world is quiet here?" asked Larry.

"Yes, that's a good to put it," said Ishmael.

"Larry left and came back with a plate. 'Your instructions are inside the Chicken Surprise,' he said.

"That's how Ishmael ended taking a bathyscaphe mission meant for me," I said. "Meanwhile, I had misread a sausage message and went to the wrong place for instructions."

"I'm surprised he got away with it," Beatrice said.

"He was devious and clever about fitting in," I said, "But he didn't know enough about how to operate the bathscaphe and ended up wrecking it. Kit was furious, since she designed it."

"So that's how he ended up on the island," Beatrice said.

"It seems so. And now that I know how Kit and Olaf died, I suspect he did it. He must have harpooned Olaf and poisoned Kit." I said.

"I think you're right about Olaf, but my mother's poisoning was accidental," Beatrice said.

"I wouldn't be too sure Ishmael wasn't responsible," I said grimly.

"You're a bit paranoid, aren't you?" Beatrice asked.

"A paranoid only thinks people are after him. In my case, I know they are. For example, when I got the sugar bowl away from the Hotel Denouement the night before the fire, a woman was hiding in the trunk of my taxi. I barely got away from her."

"I had such a hard time getting you to trust me," said Beatrice. "You wouldn't respond to my letters."

"You scared me," I admitted. "When you dropped that note through the hole you bored in my ceiling and calculated exactly how to make it hit the fan and unfurl on my desk, for example. That showed genius, but it was frightening."

"Th-- then I decided to appeal to your softer side with that last note. I copied the idea from your first note to the original Beatrice."

"That was a much better approach," I said. But I wondered why she had hesitated. Was she about to say "They" instead of "Then"? A flicker of my old fear returned.

"Look, the water is rising!" Beatrice said. "We can get to the island now."

I put my fears out of my mind for the moment. There was work to be done! 


	6. Searching

**Chapter 6**

We took the rowboat because the water was still too shallow for anything with too deep a draft (a word which here means "the depth of water a boat loaded with a writer, a young woman, a caged bat, seven cameras, and 39 notebooks takes up").

In a few minutes we came upon a scene that caused both of us to gasp. It was the wreck of the Beatrice, perched on a protruding rock. We quickly spotted a hair-ribbon on top of a floating barrel, a round pair of spectacles dangling from a rope, and an extra-large cooking whisk secured to the wreckage by a rope.

"That's Sunny's favorite extra-large cooking whisk!" Beatrice exclaimed. "It looks like they were trying to invent something with it, like a propeller."

"I recognize Klaus' glasses and Violet's hair ribbon from their pictures, too. This is not a good sign. If they shipwrecked here too they would have taken them back," I said.

I took several photos of the scene, planning to turn them over to my illustrator, Mr. Helquist. To me it looked staged. How could the ribbon and the glasses have remained in such precarious places all these years? I decided to say nothing about this for now.

"It look like the island is still deserted, or someone would have salvaged all this," was my only remark.

I picked up the glasses and the ribbon and photographed them against white paper for my notebooks. I also photographed the spatula, the whisk, and a huge wooden spoon I found floating nearby.

"There's no time to waste here," urged Beatrice. "We need to go to the room under the apple tree to get the best records for your story."

We landed and walked quickly through the side of the island where Ishmael had ruled. This part had gone completely back to nature, and only scraps of white cloth showed where the tents had been. We walked briskly over the brae to the Baudelaire's side of the island.

The room under the apple tree was wonderful. Even though the Baudelaires must have packed many things with them when they left, the room was still cluttered with signs of their time here. Violet had improved the range of the periscope and created a device for bringing water from the sink to the reading chairs. Klaus had organized the bookshelves and left notes and recommendations of the best books. Sunny had left a stack of recipes in the kitchen, transcribed in Klaus' handwriting. All were apparently left for the comfort of the next castaways, who had never arrived.

"They said there used to be people shipwrecking here all the time," Beatrice said, "But it didn't happen the year I lived here, and I guess nobody else has come in the last ten years. Do you suppose the weather patterns have changed?"

"Maybe," I said uncertainly.

Just then I came across the biggest prize of all for my book research: _The Series of Unfortunate Events_. I had heard rumors of such a book from my V.F.D. sources, and I was inspired to use that as the title for my own book series. But here was the real thing. It was full of the sad stories of the castaways who had come here over the years. Most importantly for me, it had additional notes by the Baudelaires.

"I'm going to be able to finish my books now," I told Beatrice excitedly. "I'll have to take this book with us. There's no time to read it all before the tides turn."

"You have everything you need to finish the books?" Beatrice asked in an odd tone of voice.

"Not quite," I said; "I would really like to find out what happened to the island's settlers after they left the Baudelaires. If I could interview them it would provide closure for my readers, which is something the poor souls seldom get from my books."

"I know where to find them," said Beatrice. "They're on another island, the one I was shipwrecked on for the ten years after I left this one."

"Excellent," I said. "We'll go there next."

As I picked up the book to take with us, it fell open to a set of missing pages. I glanced at the margin on the page before the gap, where Klaus had printed neatly: "We're sorry we had to remove and destroy these pages. They contained a terrible secret that Sunny and Baby B. must never know. Signed: Violet and Klaus Baudelaire."

I shut the book quickly before Beatrice noticed, and headed back with her to the rowboat.


	7. Survivors

**Chapter 7**

Before we left, I asked Beatrice if she wanted to visit her parent's graves. She shook her head.

"My biological parents were so different that I'm sure one or the other would disapprove of me. The Baudelaires are the only ones that matter to me now."

It was a bit ambiguous, I thought. Kit would surely approve and Count Olaf disapprove of her. Why did she say "one or the other?"

We got back to the main boat in plenty of time before the tides ran out, and I navigated to the new island with her directions. It was green and beautiful, with steep braes containing caves for fruit bats.

"You told me that living there was an unhappy period of your life," I prompted.

"Yes, and not only because I missed the Baudelaires," Beatrice said. "The people were divided into two schisms that barely spoke to each other."

We arrived at the shore and I saw immediate signs of the schism. There was a rough board fence dividing the island in two. One one side, someone had made a sign pointing to the other side with the word "Complexes." One the other side, a sign pointing the opposite way said "Simpletons."

"Which side do you want?" asked Beatrice. "The other side won't talk to you once you chose a side to visit."

"Which side did you live on?" I asked.

"The Complexes suited me better," said Beatrice. "They were the ones that rejected the simple life Ishmael imposed. Friday, Erewhon, Finn, Professor Fletcher, Byam, Ms. Marlow, Willa, Robinson, Sherman, Weyden, Rabbi Bligh, and Brewster were in that group. The Simpletons, who wanted things the same old way, are Ariel, Omeros, Larson, Mr. Pitcairn, Mrs. Caliban, Calypso, Alonso, Ferdinand, Dr. Kurtz, Madame Nordroff, and Jonah and Sadie Bellamy."

"And Ishmael himself? Where was he?" I asked.

"I don't think he ever made it to the island, but nobody was willing to tell me the whole story. You may have better luck."

"Since you can give me the Complexes' point of view, I'd better speak to the Simpletons," I said.

"I'll meet you back here after I talk with my friends," Beatrice said.

I walked around the beach, where I met an old friend pounding raw fish to make cerviche.

"Miranda Caliban!" I greeted her.

"Lemony Snicket!" she replied. "I'm glad to see you. Have you decided to stop running from the law and live the simple life?"

"I may do that," I said, "But I have sworn to finish a set of books first."

"Books!" said Mrs. Caliban. "Such a source of trouble. I wanted my daughter Friday to be spared the problems that my other daughter Fiona got into by studying poisonous mushrooms and such."

"Fiona was told you died in a manatee accident, though she suspects otherwise," I said.

"I told my daughter Friday the same thing about her father," said Mrs. Caliban. "We both agreed to do that when we split up."

"Captain Widdershins is Friday's father?" I asked.

"Yes, but I prefer his real name, Thursday Caliban, to his V.F.D. code name," said Miranda.

"By the way, I need a little information on what happened after you left the island," I said. "It would be a great favor to me..."

"All right, for the sake of our old friendship I will," Miranda said. "We were sailing for land, because we had all gotten exposed to Medusoid Mycellium spores and Ishmael said we could get to the Lousy Lane horseradish factory in time."

"You couldn't have made it in an hour," I said.

"We were groggy with coconut cordial and not thinking clearly," said Mrs. Caliban. "Anyway, the Incredibly Deadly Viper swam after us with an apple and gave it to Friday. She took a bite and then secretly passed it to me."

"You were wise to trust her," I remarked.

"I wouldn't have taken it except that she opened her mouth and showed me the mushrooms were gone," said Mrs. Caliban. "One by one we passed it to the others and everyone secretly took a bite without telling Ishmael."

"Then what happened?" I asked.

"After we had been at sea two hours, Ishmael seemed surprised we were all still alive. I asked him how much longer to the horseradish factory. When it turned out we were still three hours away, we challenged him. He had eaten an apple himself and he was expecting us all to die peacefully, still accepting his authority. He stood up in the boat, shouting at us and demanding we listen to him."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"We rocked the boat," said Mrs. Caliban. "He fell overboard. He still had a lot of clay on his feet and he sank like a rock."

"How did you get here?" I asked.

"We came across a ship that was willing to take us here, where horseradish grows wild. They towed us to avoid contamination."

I returned to the boat, where I found Beatrice talking with a tough-looking woman I didn't recognize. The woman had her hands in the pockets of her woolen robe.

"This is Ariel," Beatrice said.

"Ariel? I thought you were on the other side of the schism here from Beatrice," I said.

"I made an exception in her case," said Ariel with a half-smile.

"Did you find all the information you needed so that you could finish the books?" Beatrice asked.

"I think I have enough," I said. "I won't tell every detail and incriminate these folks, but I can say enough to provide the closure I was looking for."

"Then my side of the bargain is complete and you have to help me save the Baudelaires?" asked Beatrice.

"Yes indeed," I said.

Beatrice nodded to Ariel, who suddenly grabbed me and pressed a chloroform-soaked rag to my face. As I went under, I knew too late my suspicions had been entirely justified.


	8. Stasis

**Chapter 8**

There are many pleasant ways to wake up, such as as having your butler bring you coffee and custard eclairs in bed. And there are many unpleasant ways, such as finding yourself about to be devoured by a hungry tiger. This time was of the latter type. On the whole I think I would have preferred the tiger.

A hand was slapping my face. "Wake him up," commanded a woman's voice. "I want him conscious before he goes into stasis."

I was in a room with dull metal walls which looked like the brig of a submarine. It was dimly lit by a single light fixture in the center of the ceiling. On platforms spaced around the walls there were motionless figures that looked like waxworks on display: the Baudelaires, the Quagmires, and Fiona. They all looked no older than when they had disappeared. Standing in the middle of the room was Beatrice, clutching the cage with her fruit-bat Lugosi.

The woman slapping me was Ariel, and the commanding her was named Arachne. I had the misfortune to meet Arachne once before, when she hid in the trunk of my taxi in an attempt to steal the sugar bowl. Both women were wearing guns.

When she saw my eyes were open, Ariel shoved me to a standing position on one of the empty platforms. Arachne flipped up a lever on a console in front of me, and I was instantly frozen in place.

"There's no escape now, Mr. Snicket. We can keep you locked in this stasis field for years if we want to," said Arachne. "You're on the Interrogator, a submarine we made from a gigantic chambered nautilus."

"You're the only person who knows where the sugar bowl is," said Ariel. "That's why we persuaded Beatrice to lure you out of hiding."

"I'm sorry, Lemony," said Beatrice. "The Female Finnish Pirates showed me that they had the Baudelaires, and I had to save them."

"We just call ourselves the F.F.P. now," said Arachne.

"We've gone as far beyond mere robbery at sea as the V.F.D. has gone beyond fire-fighting," said Ariel.

"Keeping their word is part of their pirate code," said Beatrice. "They let me make a bargain with you. You promised to help me rescue the Baudelaires in exchange for information that would help you finish your books, but I didn't promise you'd actually get to finish them. They promised they would free the Baudelaires in exchange for you."

"Unfortunately, Beatrice," said Arachne. "Keeping our word is another thing we've gone beyond. We have no intention of freeing our captives, including you. You know too much, and we need you for experim--".

Beatrice gave a piercing shriek and threw her bat-cage straight up at the light with astonishing speed. It shattered the bulb, plunging the room into darkness. I heard a thump to my left; Beatrice had managed to ricochet the cage so it hit Ariel on the head and knocked her out.

"Give up this foolishness!" demanded Arachne. She fired her gun blindly toward where she had last seen Beatrice. She was rewarded by a sharp cry of pain.

Just then, there was another sharp squeak in front of me. It seemed that Lugosi was pulling down all the levers on the console. I remembered Beatrice giving the bat a straw to pull down like a lever at the root-beer-float emporium. She must have been planning for this contingency for a long time.

I was free to move, and so were all the other prisoners. We rushed Arachne and got the gun away from her. "Put her in a stasis field," I suggested.

We moved both F.F.P. agents onto stasis platforms and turned them back on. Everyone started talking at once.

"We're finally free!"

"Are you all right, Violet?"

"As well as can be expected. How about you?"

"Are there any more of them?"

"I think they were the only two aboard. They said membership was in decline."

"Where's Beatrice?"

"Where's the door? We could let in some light,"

"Over here."

Klaus opened the door, and by the light from the corridor we saw that Beatrice was down, bleeding from a wound to her neck. Sunny cried out and rushed over to try to stop the bleeding.

"Don't worry... about me," said Beatrice. "I knew I had to take... the risk to save you..." That was all she managed to say before she went unconscious.

"Beatrice!" cried the Baudelaires together.

We picked up Beatrice and moved out into the lighted corridor. We found the main controls and got the Interrogator to the surface so that we could get away in my boat, which the F.F.P. had taken when they captured me. (We found it stashed in a room near the brig, still full of my notebooks and cameras).

I will not describe the Interrogator (the submarine I had called "The Great Unknown"), with its twisted compartments built into the nautilus' shell, its long slimy tentacles which were still alive but which smelled like something dead, and its hideous staring eyes. I will not describe it because it was much too horrible to describe.

"I've set the controls so the monster will dive deep and stay there," said Violet.

No one seemed particularly concerned about the villains we had left in stasis. Ten years of immobility would make anyone bitter.

"Mr. Snicket?" asked Fiona. "They said you knew where the sugar bowl was. You must also know what's in it."

"We've been held prisoner for years for it," said Sunny. "I think we have a right to know."

I raised my eyebrows at Violet and Klaus. They nodded.

"All right," I said, pointing to Sunny. "The secret of the sugar bowl is... you!" 


	9. Sugar Bowl

**Chapter 9**

"What do you mean by that?" Sunny asked.

"To explain, I have to go back a bit. I read the book 'The Series of Unfortunate Events' on the way from your island to a second island where the other castaways ended up, especially the parts the three of you added. You mentioned that Kit refused to eat a one of the hybrid horseradish-apples. Do you remember why?"

"Because it might harm her unborn child," Violet said. "That's why our mother didn't eat the apples -- she was pregnant with me at the time."

"But it was a new hybrid. How did she know?" I asked.

"It was a very close call," said Violet. "It was described in the part of the book we tore out. Mother's sister Josephine was also on the island, and also pregnant. She happened to eat an apple first, and it caused her to miscarry."

"Mother and Father tried to find out what had gone wrong, and they discovered a substance in the hybrid that overstimulated the developing nervous system of the unborn child," said Klaus. "They determined to find a solution; they experimented on the wild sheep."

"But now the others on the island were frightened and turned against them, and against all the technology they had championed," said Violet. "They had a break-though right before they were forced to leave. They believed that the hybrid apples, combined with their formula, and taken in the last month of pregnancy, would produce super-intelligent children."

"That's what they took with them, hidden in a sugar bowl," said Klaus. "Dried horseradish apples and their formula. Their message said that it might take years, but once they convinced themselves it was safe they would try it on a child of their own."

"That was Esme's heirloom sugar bowl, which I helped Beatrice steal from her years ago as a prank because we disliked her," I said. "At that time, there was nothing in it but sugar but Esme took it very personally."

"Wait a second," said Sunny. "Are you saying they experimented on _me_? That I'd be a different person without that formula? I can't believe it."

"It happened," I said. "You have an extraordinary private language, and a genius for cooking. Not to mention your phenomenal reflexes and strength."

"I don't have phenomenal reflexes and strength," said Sunny.

"An ordinary child couldn't fence with her teeth, or climb an elevator shaft using teeth and neck muscles alone," I replied.

Sunny tucked her face under her arm and began to cry.

"It's a terrible secret, that Sunny's parents did that to her," said Fiona. "Now I know why stepfather didn't want to tell me."

"The villains couldn't be sure that any of the rest of you weren't super-children too. You're not, as far as I know, just very talented. But that's why they kept you all alive."

"They executed Captain Widdershins, Phil, and Fernald right away," said Isadora. "They said they had no use for them."

"They must have done the same to any other shipwreck victims these last ten years," I said. "They wanted those apples to themselves so they could raise an army of super-children once they got the sugar-bowl formula."

"Why didn't they take over the island long ago?" asked Duncan.

"I think they only found out about the apples on that island when they heard of a boat-full of castaways saved from Medusoid poisoning by one apple. They recruited Ariel to spy on Beatrice for them and to force her to lure me out of hiding when she was old enough."

"What about Beatrice?" asked Violet. "Is she... one?"

"She seems to be," I said. "She's a genius-level detective and baticeer, and you saw how fast and strong she was when she attacked the villains. She can calculate trajectories perfectly, too."

"But how could she be?" asked Quigley. "When was Kit ever near the sugar bowl?"

"There was an opportunity," I said. "When the Queequeg was out hunting for the sugar bowl, Kit figured out that it had drifted to the Gorgonian Grotto. She took a fast boat to the ruined Anwhistle Aquatics building and went down a passage to the grotto and got the sugar bowl. But her instruments told her that Olaf's submarine and the Interrogator were closing in. So she swam down to fetch Captain Widdershins, also known as Thursday Caliban."

"I was very angry at her when I found out she did that," said Fiona. "It was horrible of her to talk him into deserting us. But I didn't dare say anything; they had just defeated Fernald and I in the Carmelita. They said they would forgive us. I still can't forgive her."

"I agree: it was wrong of Widdershins to desert his submarine and you," I said. "Kit claimed they had to get the sugar bowl out of there right away and they didn't dare take it straight back by water because of the Carmelita and the Interrogator. She needed him to take a rowboat to an island with crows so he could send the sugar bowl on to the Hotel that way; he's an expert crowiceer. She had to get back to meet Quigley. Later she would meet Widdershins at sea for another mission, as you know."

"They could have at least left a note," Fiona protested.

"Yes, but they didn't know when you'd be back or if the submarine would be captured by enemies while you were gone. Kit thought it was safer to leave no clues. She could get selfishly obsessed by her missions."

"And you think she took the formula when she had the sugar bowl?" Klaus asked.

"It would be just like her to want to make her baby a super-agent for the V.F.D." I said. "Beatrice still could be."

"No," said Violet, who had been cradling Beatrice in her arms all this time. "Her pulse is gone. She's dead."


	10. Schism

**Chapter 10**

The Baudelaires wept over the daughter they had known for such a short time. The Quagmires and Fiona, who barely knew her at all, mourned for the girl who had sacrificed herself to save them. So did I.

"We should bury her at the island," said Violet. "Her parents' graves are there."

"Her happiest times were there too, she told me," I said. "But it's not safe to go back there. Arachne and Ariel weren't the only two F.F.P. members left. I suspect they have a guard patrol to catch castaways."

"We have to fight them," said Duncan. "We can't let them keep going, after what they did to us."

"I agree," said Isadora. "But we can't just charge in there against armed pirates. We have to plan carefully and build up our own weapons and skills."

"I used to think I could just be a chef," said Sunny. "But I'm with you now -- the F.F.P. has to be eliminated."

"So am I," said Violet.

"Me too," said Klaus.

"This is going to be a long struggle," said Quigley. "The F.F.P. has been around for centuries. What we need is to use the best weapon we have -- the sugar bowl. We could build up an army of genius children to fight them."

"NO!" cried Sunny. "That makes us no better than them. I'll use my own mind to fight them, but I won't turn another child into a weapon against her will."

"I'm thinking that the sugar bowl should be destroyed," said Klaus.

"That would be a mistake," said Duncan. "We have an edge now, but they could eventually re-create the research on their own, especially now that they have the apples."

"The genii is out of the bottle," said Fiona.

"If we built up another V.F.D. based on this technology, how do we know it would maintain its noble purpose?" asked Violet. "What if there were another schism?"

"It seems to me that we have another schism, right here," said Sunny. "I'm absolutely unwilling to use the sugar bowl secret that way."

"They subjected us to ten years of miserable captivity," said Isadora. "I think we should do anything and everything we can to stop them."

"Quigley, do you still feel anything for me?" Violet asked. "Kit said you or your brother called my name just before you were captured. I think it was probably you. I ask you to respect my sister's feelings in this."

"It was me, Violet," said Quigley. "But I was held in stasis for ten years, forced to look across the room at you every day. It was enough to kill any romantic feelings I had. I'm sorry, but I think we should see other people."

"What about you, Fiona?" Klaus asked. "Kit said you were desperate to get back to me."

"I feel about the same way as Quigley," said Fiona. "All I'm desperate for now is revenge on the F.F.P."

"I have some input into this, too," I said. "The sugar bowl has already caused enough trouble. I plan to destroy it as the Baudelaires have asked."

"Then we'll just have to re-create the research ourselves," said Quigley angrily.

The two sides glared at each other, unable to reach an agreement.

"What about the burial of Beatrice?" I brought up again. Everyone stopped arguing and looked at each other guiltily.

"We'll have to bury her at sea," said Violet. "There's no other place."

The funeral brought everyone together for a short time, but it seemed that the schism was permanent. When we got the boat back to the city, the Baudelaires and the Quagmires plus Fiona went their separate ways.

"You could still make the world a better place as a chef," I told Sunny. "You don't have to dedicate your life to revenge."

"I'll think about it," she promised me.

As for me, I had a book series to finish, so I took Lugosi and returned to my bat-cave on the brae to write. I decided to exclude the details I had learned after our capture out of respect for Sunny's privacy. It left the series a bit open-ended, but I will leave the rest to the imagination of my unfortunate readers and even more unfortunate fan-fiction writers. I will no longer follow the adventures of the Baudelaires in detail.

As a tribute to the young Beatrice, I submitted the letters she sent to me along with my letters to the older Beatrice which young Beatrice had used for inspiration. I warned the publisher they might be in danger (from the F.F.P. wanting to eliminate evidence) if they didn't either destroy the documents or make as many copies as possible. They chose the latter option.

If you find this document, please do not make as many copies as possible. Destroy it at once without reading it.

With all due respect,  
Lemony Snicket


End file.
